Courses

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Course Descriptions

MECH_ENG 495: Theory of Heterogeneous Materials

Quarter Offered

Prerequisites

Description

Heterogeneous materials appear pervasively in Nature (e.g., polycrystals, wood, bone, blood, …), physical systems (e.g., (un)stable colloidal suspensions, …), or in engineering applications (e.g., fiber-reinforced materials for aircraft structures, reinforced rubber in car tires, …). They usually exhibit remarkable physical properties, in general superior to the properties of their individual components. Despite being comprised at the microscopic length scale of multiple domains with different physical properties, these materials behave from a macroscopic perspective as homogeneous materials and can therefore be assigned macroscopic (or effective) physical material-like properties for practical purposes.

The course will cover classical and more recent analytical and numerical methods for the computation of various physical properties (viscous/thermal/dielectric, elastic, viscoelastic, thermoelastic, piezoelectric, electrostrictive) of heterogeneous materials that exhibit (non)linear and/or coupled behaviors.